


this is what you came for

by teavious



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-06
Updated: 2016-07-06
Packaged: 2018-07-21 23:35:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7409590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teavious/pseuds/teavious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Damen and Laurent, a story told in glances.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this is what you came for

**Author's Note:**

> Set up to the ending of second volume.

Damen _breathes_. It’s the most sickening thing in the world, he feels, being alive after such a long time, after being put in chains and failing at the most basic of instincts: fear. He never doubted, he never questioned, he simply trusted – this the only way he knew how to live, and now thrown in a world where he’ll have to shed it away.

Damen breathes. It pulls at his lungs, burns at his ribs, and yet this is the testimony that he’s alive, and he does not complain, does not try to shift, to make it easier on his numbing legs or hurting wrists.

Damen breathes. It is the air of another country, it is the air allowed to a slave, not a king, and yet it’s nothing all that changed from the one in the capital of his own kingdom.

Damen breathes. He listens to the urgent whispers of the slavers, he understands where he’s going and he cannot stop a shiver. He hasn’t stepped on the lands of Vere in years, and yet it’s just the same. It fills him with rage and despair, it makes him want to turn around, it makes him want to drop in the sand and taste it, to know what he’s done before. It makes him wonder if he’ll feel Auguste’s blood.

He’s dragged and pushed, just a man between men, a slave among lords. When he falls on the marble floor, in front of the Regent, the Prince, he has yet to look up and acknowledge, truly and finally, his situation. There’s an elbow between his shoulder blades, forcing him lower, and his eyes snap to the soldier, and stop on the Prince.

The resemblace is stricking. The way his hair falls, looking smoothly and stupidly golden. The way his lips are rosy and slightly apart, pulled downwords in a disgusted smirk. His long fingers, drapped along fine fabrics, and looking like he was born to sit in front of the whole court, and yet like he’d never manage to get far away enough from them all. Their eyes meet for the smallest fraction of time, and yet, Damen feels himself shuddering against the restraints placed on him. It’s like he’s a mouse caught in the mouth of the cat already, and he has nowhere to run, nowhere to go. Laurent is a Jokaste, a lover for a night or that lover that came back to him over and over again when he was younger. Laurent is everything he might have wished for, wanted and lusted for, and maybe this is what hurts the most, the way his brother wanted him to suffer.

Damen breathes. This time this image in front of him, and he doesn’t know if he should rest his head in his lap and ask for answers or recoil from his presence like he’s a serpent ready to strike.

* * *

 

Damen listens. In a court full of lies, he listens and he trusts and then he tries not to. It’s a lesson that he has to learn over and over again, in the middle of a bathrom, tied to a flogging post, fighting with men in ways he never imagined, in a battle he didn’t want to take part in.

Damen listens. In the darkness, he hears giggles from young men, sighs from tired servants, and he wants to not hear anymore. It’s the only way in which he can truly find out – things, why he’s truly here and what’s truly happening behind the closed doors of Vere royalty, and yet.  He wishes he wouldn’t have to try so hard, to hear so clearly this everyday life of everyone, to grow and care for people who look at him like they want him to drop dead. It’s a power into itself, how easily fooled and manipulated he is and he does not kid himself that he’ll find a place in this palace, with how things stand now.

Damen listens. And yet, the silence, when it comes, it’s defeaning. The candles in Laurent’s room continue to burn throughout the night, and yet there is no sound. Damen learns to navigate through it, to make out how heavy a silence falls, what Laurent might need from the way he deals with silence, from the way he makes it come, from the way he demands it.

Damen listens. And sometimes, it is like the world reshapes itself around the small, content sigh from Laurent’s lips, around the way his fingers wrap around a piece of meat like it’s the most precious thing in the world. No sound escapes this cold bitch prince, as his own people call him, when his fingers brush Damen’s lips, and yet it feels like the world is in flames all around him.

Damen understands the shame of the gesture, the significance, and it’s a play he doesn’t want to have a part in, a vile display of the power Laurent holds. Small, but power nonetheless. There’s the most tensionate of silence over the table, as the beast is tamed, and yet Damen looks at the Regent and sees no such thing done. It takes every ounce of Akielon patience to wait for the murmurs of the people seated around them to take over the general mood, and only then does he look up at this man who somehow managed to drag him in all of his problems and intrigues.

At first, it’s almost unrecognizable. He’s satisfied with his deed, looking at his hand like he had willed it to make a miracle and it actually happened. It’s that starstruck attitude that feels familiar, and Damianos, heir to Akielos, knows it too well. All the times he had managed to outrun his brother, the times when he had done something better than him come washing down the present, and yes – it’s the succes of one against the other who always felt like the natural enemy. It’s the terror behind Laurent’s blue eyes and stiff shoulders that make it ten times worse, and Damen snaps back to the reality of a court where too much is hidden, where he isn’t graced its inner most secrets and he has to accept it.

He feels satisfied, even after a fork is stabbed in his thigh, that Laurent has looked in his way. Has cared enough to fish for reactions. Either if it is because of him or because of Nicaise, it doesn’t matter. The whole world has been proven wrong, and Laurent is there, in the middle of it, alive and ablaze.

* * *

Damen feels. The steps of a whole army, raising the dust in the road, vibrating through his chest and giving his being a second heartbeat, this one belonging to all and to none. It’s this, the mechanics of men sent to scream and die and betray and fight that the world is set upon, and Damen takes it all in like it’s the milk he’s been fed with when he was born.

Damen feels. The arguments rising before a punch is thrown, because he has seen it all again before, but like everything involving Vere and its ruler, ten times worse and more complicated. He feels the sweat of their bodies, the smell of their anger and it burns the marks of war on his skin. He feels their dissatisfactions, rising higher with every coming sunrise, he feels the friction between their bodies to release it all.

Damen feels. The way steel sings to him to pick it up and fight. The way the map is screaming for a way to go and conquer and prove something to the world. The way hard ground is the best lullaby for weary bones. The way unslept nights make him more alert, bring out the feral side in him. The way _his_ comrades are now reffering to him as one of them and the way that makes him feel like he’s already a living and breathing part of this land. The way his heart breaks when he knows this isn’t really the case, when his heart pulls at his desire for revenge and he lets it win.

Damen feels. A body against him, flushed and shaking with contained laughter. A body against him, strong and bloodied and of an unsung hero. A body against him, punishment and contentment and all he never knew he needed. It’s new and terrifying and he keeps his eyes closed, savoring the moment when he’s just a man, just a body against another, skin touching skin.

It’s easy, in the softness brought by alcohol, good fighting and a warm fire, to raise his head and look at Laurent like the equals they are supposed to be. He sees the way the shadows lick at his face, eating him up and then showing him bare, and it might be a game he won’t tire of. In the softness brought by alcohol, good fighting and a warm fire, he allows his eyes to linger on the slender fingers of Laurent, splashed around the furs, on Laurent’s legs, drapped just a push away from his own, so natural and comfortable  that he can’t truly believe it at first. He looks, for a very long time, at Laurent’s lashes, a detail he might have never considered before but one that now feels vital to the construction of the prince’s self in his mind, his memory.

He wants this moment, away from conflict, surrounded by friends who could be worse, to last forever. Then, Laurent speaks, voice a little rough and an indignation that is as new, as it is familiar.

Damen laughs. Boysterous, wild and – well, happy.

* * *

Damen sees an army fall and an army rise and the realization he helped moves him as fast as his galloping horse, in coming back to Laurent. What a world this is, where two future rulers of enemy countries come together. Damen sees it, saw it for a while, and ignores it still.

Damen sees celebration, sees the people cheering and drinking, shouting and hugging. He sees blood spilling the roads, from the offering they gave to their pain-thirsty war-cries, from the violent happiness of afterwards, where food is requested and animal sacrifaces are made. He sees the easy way in which they all die in the end, and he’s glad, deep in his heart, that death hasn’t found him yet. But this, this right now is no war. It’s the pure, explosive joy of the living and the restrained mourning, pushed aside. He sees some people missing and tries not to let his thoughts linger on that, his eyes scanning and searching some more.

And then, there. Damen sees Laurent, amidst of all the others, laughing like he conquered the sun, like he’s the sun itself.

 

**Author's Note:**

> You can also find me on [tumblr](http://teavious.tumblr.com/)! ~


End file.
